It’s a familiar zombie story by now: struggling dead-tree publication gets sold to private-equity player or gray corporate entity known to manage for costs. Layoffs and cuts ensue as “efficiencies” are “realized.” The product lives on in revenant form, shambling into the digital future—but no one doubts its real life is firmly in the past.

At Rolling Stone, there are signs that this script is being re-written. It’s been two-and-half months since the onetime counterculture bible, founded by Jann Wenner in 1967, found its safe harbor in Jay Penske, a 39-year-old automotive scion whose Penske Media Corporation acquired a 51 percent stake in Rolling Stone after Wenner finally unloaded the other 49 percent to a Singapore-based music start-up, BandLab, in 2016. In a roughly $50 million deal that closed on December 20, Penske’s majority investment valued parent company Wenner Media at a reported $100 million, bringing a much-needed flush of optimism to a publication mired in the same advertising and newsstand troubles that have hammered the entire print industry over the past decade. Usually, legacy brass are the first thing to be excised in these situations, but amazingly, Penske has thus allowed the brand’s brain to live. Jann and his 27-year-old son, Gus, are staying on the payroll—as editorial director and president/chief operating officer, respectively—and Gus has been given a seat on PMC’s advisory board.

Penske has evinced a certain media-tycoon swagger, which never hurts with a brand like Rolling Stone. In media circles, he first appeared on the radar with his 2009 purchase of Nikki Finke’s influential Hollywood Web site, Deadline, and became more of a character to watch as the result of an epic feud with Finke that garnered ravenous press coverage. (Contending with Finke, as everyone in the business knows, takes bravery—or foolishness—and it perhaps says something about Penske’s character that they eventually repaired the relationship, with Finke returning to PMC as an external consultant.) Penske later bolstered his media profile with the purchase of Variety in 2012 and Women’s Wear Daily in 2014—two ailing trade publications that Penske has infused with new sex appeal and financial promise.

But Rolling Stone will be a bigger test for Penske. In some ways, Penske is like Gus Wenner—a rich kid with a self-made father. It gives both of them a lot to prove. “He’s going to work harder to prove he earned this than anyone else in this situation,” a media executive who has spent time with Penske told me. “He has that in his favor. It also seems like he has a lot more money in his favor. He runs his titles for profitability. I think if he plays his cards right, he can go from a B player to an A player.”

Penske, who is known to be press shy, declined to be interviewed for this story, so the nuts and bolts of his turnaround strategy must be left to the imagination. But the magazine is going monthly, with a print and digital overhaul scheduled to debut by June, and PMC is investing. A couple of weeks ago, roughly 20 Wenner Media employees—including the chief financial officer, chief technology officer, communications boss, and other back-end roles that would have been redundant within PMC’s corporate structure—were let go with so-called “enhanced” severance packages commensurate with their time served in the company. The savings are being redirected to editorial to the tune of a 20 percent budget increase, and Rolling Stone editors find themselves in the enviable—and perhaps unfamiliar—position of having a bunch of new jobs to fill.

PMC is also on the prowl for brand-name recruits. One person Rolling Stone has approached is Ryan Lizza, the veteran political journalist who became one in a long list of #MeToo casualties when The New Yorker declined to renew his contract in December following an allegation, as The New Yorker put it, of “what we believe to be improper sexual conduct,” which Lizza vigorously denied. (CNN, where Lizza is a contributor, “found no reason to continue to keep Mr. Lizza off the air” after a six-week investigation into the matter.) Last month, Penske called a meeting with Rolling Stone’s female editorial staff, also attended by Gus Wenner, managing editor Jason Fine, assistant managing editor Sean Woods and senior editor Rob Fischer. The purpose was for female employees to be able to speak their minds about gender representation, but also so that Penske could hear what they had to say about Lizza. Concerns were raised about how it would be perceived if Lizza were to work at Rolling Stone, and whether Lizza was ultimately a good fit, according to people familiar with the meeting. Penske acknowledged that offering him a full-time job didn’t seem like the right move. But after Lizza was cleared by CNN, and Rolling Stone had conducted its own due diligence, the editors moved forward with freelance assignments, as originally planned. (He currently has two pieces in the works for the magazine.) Additionally, Rolling Stone plans to announce this week that it has hired Jamil Smith, a left-leaning columnist and prominent Twitter user formerly of The New Republic and MTV News, as a senior writer.

Some decisions of the Penske era have already generated buzz, particularly in entertainment and music-industry circles. Rolling Stone clocked a big #MeToo scoop with its February 22 takedown of Charlie Walk, in which five women accused the top music executive of sexual harassment and misconduct going back decades. For the March 8 issue, Rolling Stone put Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman on the cover, signaling both a synchronicity with the zeitgeist and a noticeable departure from the aging rockers that tended to be Jann’s favorite cover stars. “It was like, holy shit, there’s someone on the cover from this year, and even from something going on this month,” the media executive who knows Penske (and who also knows Jann) told me. Indeed, word inside the newsroom is that Jann wasn’t hot on Black Panther as a cover choice, but the editors were pushing for it, and Penske loved the idea, too.

Rolling Stone, once home to the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, has a strong legacy of doing in-depth reportage on politics and current affairs. But popular music has always been its heart and soul, which is why Penske’s revamp is being closely watched at the uppermost echelons of the industry. The view in those circles is that Billboard, under the investment group Eldridge Industries, has fallen short in its attempt to re-fashion itself as a more consumer-focused brand with wide appeal, which gives Rolling Stone an opening. Before Penske came along, Rolling Stone was considered “dead on arrival,” according to a senior executive at a major music company. But now, depending on what Penske does, it is seen as poised for a comeback. “The obvious challenge is,” in the words of the music executive, “what does Rolling Stone mean to a millennial audience or younger? Does that brand have any relevance to anyone under 50 right now? Reviving print-media brands in this environment, particularly one whose core audience is close to the AARP range, is exceedingly difficult.” (PMC disputed that characterization, citing metrics that show Rolling Stone’s median print reader is 37 years old, and 38 to 41 years old for digital.)

In the short term, though, Rolling Stone employees are just happy that things feel less bleak. Penske conducted individual meetings with every person on Wenner Media’s full-time and part-time staff of around 150, filling the pages of three blue notebooks. One long-serving Wenner employee cried during their tête-à-tête, telling Penske that in all her years at the company, she’d never met Jann, according to people familiar with the exchange. There’s also an office upgrade to look forward to. Rolling Stone’s headquarters at 1290 Avenue of the Americas is very 90s—curvy, pale blue textured walls; patterned carpet, etc. Penske is more of a marble, mid-century-modern type of guy, and he’s eager to get the staff into new digs, pending lease negotiations. In the meantime, he has at least stocked the place with snacks and a coffee machine, which was a hotly desired amenity under the previous regime. If Penske has succeeded in stoking optimism over the past couple of months, it’s unclear how long the honeymoon period will last. (Already, some Rolling Stone staffers are wondering what’s up with the $200 million minority stake that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has acquired in PMC.) But Penske does have a reputation for treating his employees well—ordering a car for someone if there’s an emergency, having food delivered to Finke when she was ill, and so on.

Jann has transitioned into more of an emeritus role—not that one can imagine that making him happy. The latter half of 2017 was a dark time for the 72-year-old mogul. Toward the end of the year, as the #MeToo movement was snowballing, two men went public with allegations of inappropriate sexual encounters initiated by Jann, who has had relationships with both men and women, and has been partnered with the fashion designer Matt Nye since 1995. (Of one of the accusers, Jann said, “I sincerely believed our relationship was totally mutual and consensual . . . I am saddened to hear this is his memory”; of the other: “I attempted to have a sexual liaison with him. He turned me down, which I respected.”) Jann also ended up despising a well-reviewed biography by Joe Hagan, whom he had personally commissioned to tell his life’s story. Hagan wrote an honest portrayal of a complex and flawed legend, as opposed to a hagiography. The two men had become friends over the course of Hagan’s reporting and research, but as the book was going to press in the fall, they had a very public falling out. Jann broke his hip playing tennis over the summer and had a heart attack that required triple bypass surgery, an ordeal from which he is still getting back on his feet, literally—he’d been using a wheelchair, but recently graduated to a cane. Insiders say he still comes into the office most days and is active on e-mail, but Penske, and to a lesser degree Gus, are running the show now.

As for the younger Wenner, who initially came on in 2012, his role as president and chief operating officer encompasses the continued expansion of Rolling Stone’s digital footprint, including a potential YouTube partnership that Gus has been working to solidify. (Gus had also previously played a role in selling off sister titles Men’s Journal and Us Weekly to National Enquirer owner and Trump pal David Pecker’s American Media Inc.) Insiders (and outsiders for that matter) will be keeping a close eye on the dynamic between Gus and Penske. Until now, Gus, who joined the family business when he was 22, has essentially never had a boss other than his father. A few days after the deal closed, Gus was supposed to get on a plane with Jann to spend Christmas vacation at Jann’s pad in Sun Valley. But at the last minute, with Penske hard at work even as the ink was still drying, Gus thought it better to stay behind and roll up his sleeves. Some Rolling Stone insiders are skeptical about how long Gus will be around, but I’ve learned that PMC has him on a contract that extends for several years. Gus wouldn’t comment on that, but in a phone conversation, he insisted to me that he was in it for the long hall. “It’s my dad’s legacy, and it’s my future,” he said. “I couldn’t even describe to you how much it means to me, and I’m deeply, deeply committed to it.”

With Penske in the driver’s seat, there are three delicate relationships to be managed—the founder, the heir, and the guy who owns the other 49 percent. BandLab’s Kuok Meng Ruwanted to acquireRolling Stone in full, but he lost the sweepstakes and remains the minority partner. As I’ve previously reported, one of the things that had been weighing on the minds of PMC and other competing suitors was the prospect of ending up in bed with BandLab without being able to predict what sort of partner BandLab would be. (Time will tell.)

Now comes the hard part. “Rolling Stone has been a legacy magazine for a long time, and maybe it can be reinvented for the youth culture,” said Hagan. “But is that gonna happen through editorial? Is that gonna happen through print stories? Because that’s not what engages 20-year-olds.” I asked Hagan how vital Jann’s ongoing involvement is, even if largely symbolic. “I’ve always doubted the future of Rolling Stone without Jann Wenner,” he said. “Someone like him has to ask whether the legacy is a burden more than an asset. Can you hit the reset and make Rolling Stone into a thing that feels vital again, for people who have never listened to the Eagles, or don’t even know who they are?”